Barbara Rae-Venter - I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever

No human walks this world without leaving a trace. The earth measures our presence through the imprints and remnants of our time here, some subtle or microscopic, some as striking as the buildings we build or the mountains we move. We are not a stealthy species; we boldly or blindly mark where we have been. Some traces may never be examined or even known to another living being. But others will be searched for and uncovered, and from them, much can be extracted: ancient histories, family ties, illness patterns, heredities and behaviors, guilt or innocence.

We have over time become more and more proficient at analyzing these traces, to the point where bones buried for millennia can unlock the deepest mysteries and a single drop of dried blood can reveal the most fearsome monster. At this moment we are living through a forensic revolution linked to how we understand and read the human genome.

Improbably, at least to me, I am part of this revolution.

In March 2017 a man named Paul Holes called me at my home in Northern California. He identified himself as a cold-case investigator for the Contra Costa County Sheriffs Office.

At the time, I was retired after a long career as a patent attorney, and I had no training in criminal investigations or anything like that. In what began as a postretirement hobby, I was volunteering as a genetic genealogista search angel who uses DNA matches to build family trees and help solve unknown parentage issues. Often I worked with adoptees who were searching for their biological families.

In March 2015, I had begun working on a project to identify a woman who had been abducted as an infant and did not know her name or history or parentage, and I had successfully used her DNA to uncover her identitysolving a mystery that had baffled both the woman and detectives for decades. Now, two years later, Paul Holes had heard about my work on the case from an FBI lawyer and called me.

I have a cold case I need help with, Paul said. Would you be willing to work with me in identifying a criminal suspect?

I did not ask about the crime or the case. I just said that I would be willing to help. Eventually Paul told me who we were hunting for:

The Golden State Killer.

What happened over the next few months changed the field of criminology. As Time magazine put it, the work I performed on the Golden State Killer case provided law enforcement with its most revolutionary tool since the advent of forensic DNA testing in the 1980s.

This book is about some of the cases I worked on during a brief but extraordinary window of opportunityfrom roughly 2015 to 2018that may one day be seen as the golden age of investigative genetic genealogy (IGG). During this remarkable time, crimes long considered unsolvable were solved with relatively stunning speed, and criminals who had long avoided not just capture but even identification were suddenly named and held to account. Cold case files long buried in dusty cabinets were pulled out into the light and finally, satisfyingly closed. The impossible, suddenly, was possible. Aside from the beginnings of forensic fingerprinting in the late nineteenth century and the start of DNA profiling in the 1980s, there have been precious few moments when detectives, FBI agents, and other crime fighters gained such a powerful edge over the criminals they hunt.

And then, almost as suddenly as it opened, this extraordinary window of opportunity was very nearly shut.

The full story of how this breakthrough came to passof how a small band of us applied startling technological advancements to active criminal cold caseshas never truly been told before. I am telling it now. The pages that follow offer an up-close, firsthand account of the cold cases that pushed the boundaries and changed the rules, as well as an exploration of what these cases reveal about human natureabout us.

A parallel story describes how someone with no background in law enforcement and both feet planted firmly in retirement could, somehow, end up front and center in the one criminal cold case that most moved the needle, that generated thousands of headlines around the world, and that triggered perhaps the most significant ethical debate of our time: the case of the Golden State Killer.

I learned about the Golden State Killer through his victims.

There was Patrice, a nurse and newlywed, friendly and full of life, murdered brutally in her home in 1975. Patrice was twenty-seven years old in 1975, the same age I was that year. There was Jane, a young mother bound and raped repeatedly in the home she shared with her three-year-old son, who was in the house and tied up when the horrors occurred. There was Charlene, an interior decorator, discovered on her bed by her stepson, her skull crushed by a fireplace log.

And many moredozens of themmost about the same age I was during the rape-and-killing spree that spanned the twelve years between 1974 and 1986. After the last known crime in the spree, the killer vanished into anonymity, and the case went coldso cold it remained unsolved, and seemingly unsolvable, for more than thirty years.

But then, in 2017, his victims began to speak out to me through the pages of old newspapers that described the terrible crimes against them but only guessed at the nature of their unknown assailant: a lurking, stalking monster who hid behind bushes and crept through unlocked doors and windows, crouching, noiseless, quick to pounce, and now, so many years later, still only a shadow in the dark, still taunting and haunting those who survived his mayhem.

I had no experience with, or even knowledge of, the existence of such evil in our world, and I sensed that joining in the pursuit of this man would take me to some very dark places, darker than anywhere I had been before. But I also knew that I wanted to help identify him.

I was acting on an instinct ingrained deeply within me and reflected in so many pivotal moments in my life: the need to know what I do not know.

When I was young and growing up in New Zealand my mother referred to this instinct as my grasshopper mind, a restless, jumpy inquisitiveness, a tendency to examine issues from seemingly strange angles until I found a novel way to resolve them. This way of learning helped me succeed in my career as a patent attorney, and it has helped me solve cases in the nascent field of investigative genetic genealogyincluding some of the most infamous, bloody, and baffling cold cases of all time.